Category Archives: History

articles about Japanese baseball history

Japan’s most dominant

Who has been the most dominant pitcher in Nippon Professional Baseball history, and how would one go about answering this question?

It’s not an easy answer, since baseball careers represent multiple dimensions: performance over a career, performance within seasons and performance in individual games of greater or lesser import.

Therefore, there is no single objective answer, but I’ll give it my best shot.

While researching a story for Japan’s Slugger Magazine, I spoke to MLB scouts about the next crop of pitchers who might move to MLB, and they all referred to the difficulty in identifying a Japanese pitcher to follow in the footsteps of Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

I casually mentioned my belief that Yamamoto might have been the most dominant pitcher in the history of Japanese pro baseball without any objective evidence to back it up. In one sense, I believe I was spot on, and had his career continued in Japan, he certainly would have had a chance to turn in the greatest career in NPB history.

In 2013, I had a similar conversation with a co-worker at Kyodo News when I suggested that Masahiro Tanaka’s 2013 was the greatest pitching performance in Japanese history, better than Hall of Famer Kazuhisa Inao’s 1961 season, when the big guy went 42-14 with a 1.69 ERA in a career-high 404 innings.

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Nagashima: A giant among Giants

Japanese baseball’s most popular player ever, Shigeo Nagashima, passed away last week at the age of 89, and across Japan, ballparks began flying their flags and observing moments of silence for the man credited with boosting the pro baseball’s popularity.

Stories about Nagashima’s playing career and his on-field charisma are legend, but I remember him only as a manager in his second and more successful stint, when he was adored by the public and players and simultaneously mocked for his ridiculous statements, idiosyncracies, and tactics.

As a player, Nagashima was a true great, with the fifth most productive career ever by a Japanese player, and the greatest who didn’t turn pro straight out of high school. For the first four years of his career, from 1958 to 1961, Nagashima was the Yomiuri Giants’ most productive player, when he was surpassed by teammate Sadaharu Oh, who remains the greatest player born in Japan to ever play baseball.

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